New Mobile Development Toolset from IBM

IBM announced additions to its IBM MobileFirst Application Development portfolio, new industry-specific IBM Ready Apps, and the opening of 18 IBM MobileFirst studios around the world to help businesses accelerate mobile initiatives.

The new offerings are intended to help enterprise developers more rapidly design, deliver and deploy secure mobile apps. “The cost of a poorly designed app can significantly impact both the brand and bottom line,” said Marie Wieck, general manager for IBM MobileFirst. “IBM’s mobile platform, apps and studios are designed to help businesses accelerate the adoption of a mobile strategy for business growth.”

The new mobile offerings include the IBM MobileFirst Application Development portfolio, a toolset for developers to create, deploy and manage mobile apps, on-premise or in the cloud. The portfolio consists of IBM Worklight, Cloudant and BlueMix technologies and services. IBM Worklight is a mobile enterprise app development platform deployed on a client’s IT infrastructure, while BlueMix delivers similar capabilities as cloud-based services. Both can be used with Cloudant, IBM's NoSQL distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for mobile apps.

A new version of IBM Worklight now enables enterprises to optimize mobile user experiences by supporting both native (via SDKs) and hybrid development models, as well as add new capabilities such as the USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) protocol for mobile money solutions in emerging markets.